Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Negative Money was published yesterday by Soft Skull Press. This ambitious, thought-provoking book engages and collaborates with the “Talk to Transformer” text-generating website, the Forever Gwen Brooks poem generator, an Internet Anagram Server, and the lyrics of De La Soul. The poems are wildly heady and urgently tender (and full of legal tender as well) as they dismantle capitalism through the lens of race and gender and violence. In these pages you’ll find vis-po (maps made in collaboration with graphic designer Yaya Chanawichote) and sections describing Bertram’s process by Ian Davidson. In “My Past Has No Value,” Bertram constructs a powerful list poem addressing men and the power of their money—from the first who “checked [me] out in the corner bookshop at thirteen” to boyfriends, married lovers, a husband.
You can preview some of their poems here which first appeared in Gulf Coast:
https://gulfcoastmag.org/online/summer-fall-2020/4-poems-bertram/
Congratulations, Lillian-Yvonne!
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